Saturday mid-day roundup (and Open Thread)

I have learned something about myself over the past 5.5 weeks: I will never master crutches. After all this time, I still fall going up the stairs, get vertigo going down the stairs, topple over when trying to reach light switches, get abrasions on my skin, and exhaust my injured shoulder. My big hope for this coming week is that the doctor tells me I can ditch the crutches and use a cane or go unaided on my own two feet. In the meantime, though, I’ve got stuff I want to share with you:

In 2008, Obama won in significant part by hooking up with pop culture and making himself “cool.” The implication was exactly what it is in high school: if you hang with the cool kids, you’ll be cool too. Obama was cool because he hung with Hollywood . . . and young voters were cool because they wore Obama t-shirts. Obama is trying to reprise that cool factor with his current campaign to get healthy young people to sign up for Obamacare. Now that actually money is involved, I suspect he’ll have less success than in 2008, when all you needed to be cool was a t-shirt and a vote.

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When it comes to understanding how the media functions as the PR arm for the Democrat party, you can’t do better than to read John Hinderaker’s article describing the downstream fallout from the Washington Post‘s cheap and false attack on the Koch brothers. (Hinderaker’s challenge to the original WaPo article is here.) Not only does Hinderaker strip bare the ugliness behind the Post’s defense of its own bad reporting, he also analyzes why the Left is so obsessed with the Koch Brothers, the problems Democrats are starting to have with the “green” worldview, and the money behind the Democrats’ attacks on the Kochs.

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Two Democrat politicians, one in Arkansas and one in Alaska, have rather foolishly chosen to attack their Republican opponents for having been in the military. The GOP has done an ad highlighting these attacks and focusing on the fact that there is something honorable about having served in the military. I agree, but for me there’s more than that going on. When I think about military service, what I think about is competence and responsibility. In a society where young people avoid both — and, indeed, are encouraged by law to remain infantile until their 26 — the military forces young people to step up. I know that there are shirkers in the military, but the statistical likelihood is that someone who spent many years in the military is probably a can-do and will-do kind of person.

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Over the years, I’ve written about the fact that people who support abortion use a very dishonest debate tactic when they pretend that the world is the same as it was before Roe v. Wade. The implication is that, if abortion again becomes limited to life-of-the-mother (and perhaps rape and incest) cases, young girls will be thrown starving into the streets and children will be raised with the stigma of bastardy. In a world in which single mothers are one of the fastest growing demographics, this is ludicrous. The Left also pretends that women will once again return to back alley abortions, complete with unsanitary coat hangers. Indeed, one pro-Abortion outlet is giving “cute” little coat hanger necklaces to those who donate money to the cause.

Here’s something interesting, though: Just as the pro-abortion crowd lies about the world as it is, implying that unwed pregnant women will once again be driven into the snow (barefoot, of course), so too is it lying about the world as it was. Kevin Williamson finds contemporaneous evidence from Planned Parenthood itself saying that, back in the 1960s, while abortion was illegal, it was also safe — indeed, probably safer than at places like Kermit Gosnell’s House of Abortion Horror.

“White Trash” is not a skin color, it’s a state of mind. One aspect of the WT state of mind is the person who, when he knows someone else is paying the restaurant bill, orders the most expensive thing on the menu. The Obamas are quite definitely White Trash.

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In my real-me Facebook world, my friends still cling to the Anthropogenic Climate Change theory. In the real world, actual scientists (as opposed to PhD-holding crusaders looking for large government grants) are finally waking up and smelling the con-job coffee. It remains to be seen whether the climate-change generation is going to be able to walk away from this false God.

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A couple of weeks ago, I said that the hate-crime hoaxes coming from the Left meant that I didn’t believe a gay guy who claimed (without corroboration) that his aged Baptist minister grandfather, who had been married for 65 years, confessed on his deathbed that he was gay. Maybe grandpa did; maybe he didn’t. It’s just that, as I said, absent ample evidence, I don’t believe the Left. In that vein, I point out that yet another hate-crime has proven to be a hoax.

Like this:

Dang……white trash. That’s pretty tough but in the context of the Obama’s obvious disdain for the little people and their continuous self-promotion and slathering personal consumption on our dime…..the sobriquet fits.

Mike Devx

That Chinese list o travel tips is, on the whole, a darn good list. They’ve captured our zeitgeist rather well.

I myself have a lot of trouble with this rule that they spotted: Americans do not like to be interrupted when speaking; the best guests have the best ears.

I have a tendency to interrupt a speaker when the situation is crystal clear, or if I have a critical question that is best answered before we continue. But the truth is, it is *always* better to continue to listen. Only if the speaker is clearly long-winded, and in love with the sound of his or her own voice, is it really acceptable to interrupt.

I have no problem with Michelle’s parents staying with them in the White House, even on the taxpayer dime. It should be firmly a part of conservative values that the grandparents live with the grandchildren. We used to honor that; and I think we still should. Even for a Presidential Family.

Actually, it’s hard for me to think of anything serious that Michelle Obama has done in the last year to piss me off. I’ve been leaning toward thinking she’s doing a much better job as First Lady lately. Remember this one: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country”? And her intrusive social campaigns that just wouldn’t let us alone to live our lives? Her redistributionist mantras, ordering us that we were going to have to change for the betterment of her kind of country? She’s been remarkably more circumspect lately, I think. I am grateful for that!

I don’t mind her living in the White House. I do mind the junkets. It’s just wrong that Michelle spends tens if millions of dollars on these lavish trips during an endless recession — and taking granny. Along is even more ostentatious.

We have a sprawling split level that requires stairs to get to every room of note (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and office). We also have too much furniture, as my husband is a furniture hoarder. Once a piece of furniture comes into the house, it never leaves again. It’s a benign vice most of the time. 😉

Caped Crusader

As a condition of being licensed and credentialed, all architects should be required to be at least 70 years old. In which case all dwellings would be single storied, or have an elevator if more than one story.

I enjoyed the Chinese-etiquette-in-America link. I went to business school on the West Coast, and we had several courses on proper etiquette in Asian countries. Out of curiosity I looked for a corresponding link for Americans in China. (http://www.culturalsavvy.com/chinese_culture.htm). My favorite: “Do not be offended if you are pushed and shoved in a line. In some circumstances, the Chinese do not practice the art of lining up and courtesy to strangers in public places is not required”
Brought back memories of boarding the 30 Stockton in Chinatown.

Danny Lemieux

I have read several accounts written about how various Presidents and their families treat the White House staff and they generally indicate that Republicans treat them respectfully while Democrats treat them abysmally.

It’s not a debate tactic of abortion regiments. It’s a war tactic. Those two things are different from each other in important ways.

Anyone ever hear that deception is paramount in warfare?

jj

I notice from the headlines that it’s taken granny no more than a few hours to make herself widely despised by the hotel staff in China. As a previous generation would (and did) say: ‘you can’t put a beggar on horseback; he’ll kill the horse every time.’ They are perfect exemplars of the concept of ‘white trash,’ though obviously they are not that. (The Clintons are.) I don’t know what you’d call them, but Faulkner probably has a word for it somewhere. I’m sure there were a few Obamas in Yoknapatawpha County. He’d be most likely to have identified and named the concept.

Libby

The MSM would never report it, but it’s clear that Marian Robinson is and has always been the Obama kids’ live-in nanny. I might be a little less annoyed with her residing in the White House if Michelle and the adoring press didn’t refer to Michelle as “Mom-in-Chief” and treat her constant pronouncements on how the rest of us should raise our children as if they were pearls of wisdom. Probably would help if Michelle didn’t also have a record number of personal staff for a FLOTUS (is it 27? I’ve lost track), and didn’t spend so much tax payer money not only on vacations, but on her endless jaunts around the country to promote her CAP-authored Let’s Move program. There’s also her incessant need to maximize her exposure throughout the non-political media with appearances at the Oscars, the Nick awards, Ellen, The View, etc.. Just as she leans on the food industry to alter or discontinue offerings she doesn’t like while indulging on Waygu beef & lobster herself, she spares no expense living it up on the taxpayer dime while claiming the White House is her prison. This bunch has no class.

When a country is conquered and the new Grand Vizier moves in, there is no reason for the victors to treat the defeated very well.

Charles Martel

They say that for years after Andrew Jackson’s uproarious inaugural bash at the White House, the smell of cheese lingered in the East Room where it had been ground into the carpet by legions of uncouth. . . Democrats (goodness does nothing ever change?)

Assuming our republic still has a few more years left in her, the smell of sleaze will permeate the East Room long after the Oreo trash Obamas are gone.

Danny Lemieux

…not to mention they are still trying to steam the stains out of the carpets from the Clinton administration, Hammer.

Michael Adams

Danny, I hope that they did not use steam or hot water on those stains. Heat cooks the protein, and you never get it out. Cold water, leave it well wet for fifteen minutes, vacuum it up. (Note the more decorous choice of verbs, here. I am improving.)

Charles Martel

Danny, by God, we have the science, and we have the technology. We could impregnate Lena Dunham with Bill’s carpet sperm and create a race of Clintons! Bwaaaaaahhhh!